The emergence of modern capitalism in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries has been a major topic of historical research and interpretation for many years. Among the current generation of historians there has been an ex,-plosion of interest in the relationship between the growth of capitalism and the expansion of Europe in the early modern era. The interpretive work of Wallerstein and Braudel and the detailed research of a host of others have added immensely to our knowledge of this relationship. They have led many historians to break away from the conceptual frameworks traditionally employed to explain both pre-industrial capitalism and European expansion.

Nanyang Research Institute (i.e. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies) was founded in 1956. It is one of the earliest Chinese research institutes on international affairs. It focuses its attention on the politics, economy and history of Southeast Asian countries (particularly the five ASEAN countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines), as well as problems of overseas Chinese.

The investigation of a shipwreck must extend beyond the uniqueness of the single event in order to have interpretative value for social scientists. One or even several shipwrecks will not necessarily represent a universe. Since statistically significant numbers of shipwrecks may never be studied, methods of inquiry must be devised where quantity is not a prime concern. When we noted the discrepancy between cargoes listed on ships manifests and cargoes actually recovered from shipwrecks of the Spanish Colonial period, the challenge was to determine where and under what circumstances contraband behavior occurred and might be predicted.

L'histoire des femmes, jusqu'à aujourd'hui, s'est presque uniqueraent intéressée aux femmes du monde occidental.

En histoire coloniale, le viricentrisme est pratiquement dominant. Le but de cette communication est de rompre ce double isolement. A cet effet nous proposerons d'abord un aperçu des courants s'exerçant depuis dix ans dans l'his-toire des femmes; dans la seconde partie seront traités dif-férents thèmes de l'histoire des femmes en relation avec des données provenant de recherches effectuées sur la position de la femme javanaise dans I'agriculture pendant la période coloniale.

It is a well known fact that informational exchange between Cuba and the Western world is poor and, to the extent that it exists, highly polemic. This characterization of non-communication unfortunately, also applies to the field of historical research. In Western Europe, at least, there is not much scholarly interest in pre-Revolutionary Cuban history. There is no framework for historical contact either. I would say that this neglect of Cuban history is regrettable not only from an academic point of view, but also because we cannot possibly understand the Cuban Revolution without a more thorough understanding of its historical roots. Apart from being regrettable, this is also unnecessary, as I found out in the course of my particular investigation, entitled The Cuban railways, 1830–1868. Infrastructure and economic decision-making in a Caribbean plantation-economy.

The 1979 issue of Itinerario, (no. 2) opened with “A note on Suriname Plantation Archives at the University of Minnesota”, in which Richard Price of the Johns Hopkins University reported his discovery of some 2,000 manuscript pages on a number of Surinam plantations in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. This, of course, is very good news. It is perhaps still better news that the Dutch archives contain vast and almost untapped (resources on a 200-odd plantations! I am, however, certainly not the first tone to make this ‘discovery’: Mrs. M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz not only mentioned it in her Ph.D. dissertation “Asian trade and European influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630”, but she even ordered part of the archives herself. It must be the unbridgeable gap between scholars interested in the East Indies /and those who study West Indian history, that her enthusiastic remarks on the availability of plantation material went unheeded. When nine years later Th. Mathews published his article “Los estuadios sobre historia economica del Caribe (1585 - 1910)”2, he mentioned the Dutch West Indies as a blank on the Caribbean map as far as economic (plantation) history is concerned. Since Mathews wrote his article the historiographic situation has improved only slightly, and it is an ironic comment on Surinam historical scholarship that tiny Curaçao's XlXth century plantation economy by now has found its historian, while the Surinam plantations are still in search of an author.

The discovery of new areas beyond the Atlantic Ocean and the pioneering of a new searoute via the Cape to the Indian Ocean led to expansion of western Europe in the sixteenth century. There of course followed the development of trade routes to the new areas outside Europe, but there was also a significant expansion of trade inside Europe and the Middle East, as well as changes in existing trade and production patterns. These are the subject of this paper.

The system of apartheid in modern South Africa is in large measure camouflage for the maintainance of white supremacy. In the first place it entails the division of the South African population into what are euphemistically known as ‘national groups’, which.in practice come down to racial segments: white, the so-called ‘coloured’ - those of mixed race, and the descendants of the Cape colony's slaves - Indians and the Blacks. The last group, the indigeneous inhabitants of most of the land area of South Africa, form a vast majority of the country's population, but, with the so-called ‘coloureds’ and the Indians, have been systematically excluded from any real share in political and economic power. The official policy has stressed that what is intended is the creation of separate zuiien, or pillars of society. According to the ideology, South Africa is now a plural society, to such an extent that the title of the ministry formerly known as ‘Bantu Affairs’ is now ‘Plural Affairs’. In hard reality, there is geen spraak - no question - of equality between the various groups, but rather a rigourously maintained hierarchy. The whites are vastly more prosperous and control almost all sectors of the economy, through their exclusion of other races from the processes of political decision making.